| Another co-founder of Open Law Library, here. This is precisely what we are doing - building a patch-based xml database of the law. However, we are building a general tool that can work with the vast majority of state and local jurisdictions. We can't build good tools without good data. The only way to get it is to work directly with governments and make it easier for them to publish their official laws as clean xml than to publish their laws as PDFs. Revision control and the law deserves its own blog post. In addition to being patch-based, patches can be created today, but apply retroactively, or languish for years, then suddenly apply because a triggering event occurred. Our system ingests official laws and outputs an xml version of the official law. A government attorney uses our IDE to review the xml output and annotate it with codification instructions. Our system then uses those instructions to automatically codify the law, which is then published openly on the web in multiple formats. We have been rapidly iterating on our xml format. You can see the beta version for our first partner, the District of Columbia, here: https://github.com/dccouncil/dc-law-xml/tree/development (feedback welcome). As we partner with more jurisdictions, we will build a foundation of open, clean, accurate, and timely computer-readable laws on which anybody can build tools to improve government, citizen engagement, and access to justice. |
Hmm, interesting! I always assumed the patch applied immediately but the new law might contain some "effective z/y/z, ...".
This is rather unfortunate (of course not your fault), because as we all know rebasing is not necessarily conflict-free.